The unlockable modes – "The Tower of Nannar" and "The Lost Levels" – are a bit more interesting, delivering mini-campaigns with new levels that are perfectly playable solo, but more enjoyable with friends along.1001 Spikes is an 8-bit retro style "Hardest Extremest Craziest Platform Action Puzzle Adventure." Simple & intuitive rules. The first mode, a chaotic, Smash Bros.-style smack-'em-up called The Golden Vase, lets players compete to beat coins out of the titular magic urn, is open from the start, and it's fun for a few minutes at a stretch. They're great in the arcade modes, though, which let up to four (local-only) players compete to collect coins (which can buy even more extras from an unlockable shop). Using them lets you take advantage of new abilities - Tempura of the Dead's President Thompson has a double-jump and a submachine gun, for example, while Aban's sister Tina can cling to walls - but they each have to start a separate campaign from the beginning, which limits their campaign usefulness to making repeat playthroughs more interesting. Collecting the gold skulls hidden in each level unlocks a host of bonuses, including new playable characters assembled from other indie games. It’s something that doesn't necessarily make them any easier, but does make them more fun. There's more to 1001 Spikes than the 61 brilliantly grueling levels in its story mode – which, by the way, can be played in co-op with a friend. Only by going back and repeating the unfinished levels can you hope to forge ahead fortunately, you can freely revisit them from the world map. This may seem self-defeating, but the feature is clearly meant for beginners, with the catch being that skipping levels locks off the final stages of the Ukampa Temple – and, in turn, the entire second half of the campaign, during which the level-skip feature is disabled. If you're especially frustrated with a given level, 1001 Spikes has a very non-old-school feature: you can elect to simply skip ahead to the next one. As a helpful talking mouse at the beginning says, "the harder the journey, the greater the joy of success."
And for me, the palpable sense of accomplishment and relief that came with actually completing a level was always enough to make me push ahead into the next one. Nailing the timing and precision needed to actually do it was an uphill battle, of course, but part of what makes 1001 Spikes so addictive is that once a solution becomes clear, finishing the level becomes irresistible – and if you can pull it off, it's because you mastered that thing. Things that seemed impossible at first became routine and encoded into muscle memory after 10 or so deaths, and it rarely took very long to figure out what I needed to do. (Actually, dozens of tries.) In each level, I experienced three distinct phases: Immediate dread at the sight of corridors lined with rolling boulders, leaping scorpions, or spinning blades death-filled experimentation as I found a path through them and endless repetition of the same carefully timed leaps, high jumps, and knife throws so that I could repeat phases one and two while dealing with whatever fresh hell waited in the next part of the level. And forget about relying on past experience to get you through new obstacles, because each level is a uniquely shaped gem of absurd difficulty, each hidden trap has a distinct behavior, and some challenges can take hundreds of attempts to squeeze past successfully.For all its toughness, however, 1001 Spikes' clever design – which forced me to continually re-think my approach while keeping victory tantalizingly just out of reach – always kept me going for just one more try. 1001 Spikes loves to play tricks like that – and it has no mid-level checkpoints, so slip-ups get you thrown back to the start to attempt all their challenges again. Death comes quickly and frequently, often from places that looked safe seconds before you might finally make it past a seemingly impassable gauntlet of spike traps and dart-blowing statues after 50 attempts, for example, only to be crushed by a surprise falling block just inches from the exit.
0 kommentar(er)
